I don’t think I changed the difficulty-settings.

Cellulose is generally recyclable but as I understand it degrades through each cycle, until it’s basically unfit for recycling and is more efficient to burn for energy.

How do I get into it? I’ve tried and it’s not really sticking, to be honest.

By the power of podcasts, I have become equipped to handle the Sisyphean daily tasks. I used to dread them, now I don’t mind them at all.

I don’t think DeepSeek has the capability of generating code and executing it inline in the context window to support its answers, in the way that ChatGPT does - the “used”-part of that answer is likely a hallucination, while “or would use” more accurately represents reality.

The concern is that the model doesn’t actually see the world in terms of distinct hexadecimals, but instead as tokens of variable size - you can see this using the tiktokenizer-webapp: enter some text and it will split it into the series of tokens the model actually will process.

It’s not impossible for the model to work it out anyway, but it is a reason for this type of task to be a bit harder on LLMs.

It’s not out of the question that we get emergent behaviour where the model can connect non-optimally mapped tokens and still translate them correctly, yeah.

It is a concern.

Check out https://tiktokenizer.vercel.app/?model=deepseek-ai%2FDeepSeek-R1 and try entering some freeform hexadecimal data - you’ll notice that it does not cleanly segment the hexadecimal numbers into individual tokens.

Still, this does not quite address the issue of tokenization making it difficult for most models to accurately distinguish between the hexadecimals here.

Having the model write code to solve an issue and then ask it to execute it is an established technique to circumvent this issue, but all of the model interfaces I know of with this capability are very explicit about when they are making use of this tool.

Is this real? On account of how LLMs tokenize their input, this can actually be a pretty tricky task for them to accomplish. This is also the reason why it’s hard for them to count the amount of 'R’s in the word ‘Strawberry’.

Without actually knowing how much constructing the physical buttons cost, I would guess that the real savings are in process optimization - if all you have for the interface is a screen, then you don’t need to have the interface design done before constructing the car - you can parallelize these tasks.

Insufficient as far as justifications go, but understandably lucrative.

3.2 is like less than 10 minutes on a bike, which can easily carry more than a week’s worth of groceries with the right type of equipment.

Anything Turing-complete is a powerful tool, but the reason people are reacting negatively is because of how much of the wrong tool it is.

• Does an excel-based solution offer adequate runtime performance? No
• Does an excel-based solution offer adequate write concurrency? No
• Does an excel-based solution offer appropriate data durability guarantees? No

Basically the only saving grace of Excel-based solutions is that they are built in tools that finance workers comprehend, and that is quite simply not enough. To base systems at this scale on Excel is criminally negligent.

There’s potential for mitigating some of the negative impacts using a mixed approach, although I’m not convinced it’s going to be straightforward or even worthwhile.

Please refer to the section about the negative effects of reducing property taxes.

Using retirees as a tool to work against property taxes has historically been an effective strategy, but it’s important to remember:

1. What we’re actually trying to accomplish
2. Will the proposed change be effective in accomplishing the goal
3. Will the change have other consequences that are negative to the extent where the potential benefits outweigh the consequences in aggregate
4. Are there any alternative means to accomplish the original goal

One-by-one:

What we’re actually trying to accomplish

Seems to me that the root question is one of housing affordability, in particular for retirees, who may have a lot of assets, but limited cash flow

Will the proposed change be effective in accomplishing the goal

Reducing/capping property taxes does indeed make it easier for some retirees to keep affording their homes, but reducing property taxes makes real estate a more lucrative investment, driving up the overall prices of real estate. This applies for both private persons intending to use the property to live in, for private persons looking seek rent, and corporate actors doing the same. Messing with property taxes is a large part of the housing affordability issue present in many places in the U.S and elsewhere (zoning laws being another major contributor, in particular those mandating single family homes, and lack of public housing being the other major contributor). Hence, this change would only benefit those lucky enough to have purchased a home in the past, at the expense of all retirees not already that lucky, which are now less likely to be able to do so.

Will the change have other consequences that are negative to the extent where the potential benefits outweigh the consequences in aggregate

Apart from driving up the prices of real estate for other retirees, everyone else interested in purchasing a home will also feel this broad increase in prices. This has led to large swaths of the population being effectively priced out of home ownership. This has the second order effect of making owning rentals more lucrative, as higher rents can be charged, further exacerbating the larger problem of housing affordability, but now also for even poorer people.

Finally, reductions in real estate taxes limit what public services can be funded through their use. In the U.S, this primarily means schools, infrastructure, firefighting, transit etc, all of which are suffering a lot in quality, much as a consequence of having messed with property taxes in the past.

There’s a very, very strong case to be made that the consequences have very much outweighed the benefits in this scenario. I would even say that they have been devastating, being part of the root cause of a large amount of issues seen today.

Are there any alternative means to accomplish the original goal

There clearly are good means to tackle this problem in other ways, the principal of which I believe should be massive public investment in social housing. By building a huge supply of high quality homes affordable to everyone, we make sure no one will have to be forced to go without an acceptable home, regardless of whether they are retired or not.

The second strategy should be to entirely remove the kind of zoning laws that have contributed to the kind of increase in housing prices seen today - mandating that only single family homes should be allowed to be built on massive lots with low utilization is hugely harmful to housing affordability.

These two measures would address housing prices having gone up in the way they have historically, which would also lead to property taxes not rising in such a dramatic fashion.

What should never be done, however, is reducing or capping property taxes.

True? Yes, to a point. Climate solution? No.

If not, I’m sure it fits in an existing movies-community, or perhaps a videos-one if it’s a video essay.

Regardless, I still need a link to the referred video essay!

On the system I administrate, vi is symlinked to ed

Ed is the standard editor